Tagged: george skelton

Since democracy is the best system ever to honor the concept of “innocent before proven guilty,” nearly 300,000 Californians voted for Leland Yee to be our next Secretary of State. His tally came as somewhat of a surprise, considering that Yee had officially dropped out of the race after being indicted on federal bribery and...

The grave necessity of Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, was never clearer than the 2012 elections, in which citizens were presented with a “choice” between two competitie sub-brands of The Money Party monopoly. If you’re pro-war, pro-assassination, pro-bribery and...

Right. Of course. We get it. Who has time to read? Who has time to read newspapers? Unemployed stoners, for one. We have time to read newspapers – and periodicals and books, as well as all the other stuff that passes for reading these days. We have time to read, and think, and try to...

Among the usual detritus that makes its way into my inbox, an email I got recently made the come-ons for penny stocks, penis enlarging pills and Nigerian lottery windfalls seem downright benign. I was forwarded a missive featuring an authentic photo of Barack Obama standing in front of an American flag with his hands...

When Ralph Nader ran for President as an independent, many members of the chattering class expressed outrage (and profound disappointment, and all sorts of other unpleasant emotions) that the lifelong consumer advocate and muckraker would “betray” his fellow liberals by usurping votes that would have otherwise gone to Al Gore. Whatever his motives — hubris,...

Millions of Americans go to the polls today, participating in the grand charade that passes as our debased version of democracy. Millions of other Americans won’t go. They’re too lazy, or they’ve convinced themselves that their vote doesn’t matter. This time, perhaps more than in any other election in my lifetime, everyone’s vote matters. For...

Mark Foley, the Florida congressman who abruptly resigned his seat in the House of Representatives on Friday after sexually suggestive e-mail and instant messages with a 16-year-old male former congressional page became public, has — predictably — entered an alcohol treatment facility and has said how sorry he is for the harm he has caused....

Our union, intended as the felicitous conjoining of disparate states into one cooperative congregation of like-minded souls, is badly disjointed, fractured and splayed worse than perhaps any time in American history since the Civil War. The last presidential election cleaved the country into two: those who endorsed the antics of George W. Bush and those...

The astonishingly strange saga of Stanley Williams, a murderer found guilty by four courts, reached the zenith of its narrative arc yesterday when the Los Angeles Times published a full-page advertisement (paid for by celebrity supporters, one assumes) in which the convict pledged his allegiance to God and asserted his dedication to “redemption.” He did...

Should any naive idealist still embrace the quaint notion that our country’s brief experiment in democracy fulfills the purpose of “representative government,” a cursory glance at the way the Appropriations committees of the United States Senate and House of Representatives operate will cloud even the sunniest outlook. How we, the tax-paying citizens of America, spend...

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Thought Of The Week

At the World Championship Match, in Helsinki, Finland, they reached a complicated position where The Champion intended on sacrificing a knight.

The giveaway was not an obvious tactic; with all the minor pieces still on the board, the position offered a large number of possible variations, all of them leading to interesting circumstances, but nothing concretely winning. When The Champion allowed his mind to envision the sub-plots, he found nothing with a satisfying conclusion. Tendrils…

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The British mentalist, magician and showman Derren Brown has long created television specials of enduring power and controversy. Much of his work concerns psychological manipulation and social coercion. In our view, shows like “Russian Roulette” (filmed live on a 15-minute delay) and “The Push” (in which an average member of the public is convinced to...